Cui Yao, Cong Fang, Huang Fu-Biao, Zeng Ming, Wang Jun
Department of Physical Therapy, Beijing Bo'ai Hospital, China Rehabilitation Research Center, 100068 Beijing, China.
School of Rehabilitation Medicine, Capital Medical University, 100068 Beijing, China.
J Integr Neurosci. 2025 Jan 7;24(1):25731. doi: 10.31083/JIN25731.
Observation, execution, and imitation of target actions based on mirror neuron network (MNN) have become common physiotherapy strategies. Electrical stimulation (ES) is a common intervention to improve muscle strength and motor control in rehabilitation treatments. It is possible to enhance MNN's activation by combining motor execution (ME) and motor imitation (MI) with ES simultaneously. This study aims to reveal whether ES could impact cortical activation during ME and MI.
We recruited healthy individuals and assigned them randomly to the control group (CG) or experiment group (EG). Participants in EG performed ME and MI tasks with ES, while participants in CG performed the same two tasks with sham ES. We utilized functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to detect brain activation of MNN during ME and MI with and without ES, a randomized block design experiment paradigm was designed. Descriptive analysis of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin (HbR) were used to show the hemoglobin (Hb) concentration changes after different event onsets in both CG and EG, a linear mixed-effects model (LMM) of HbO data was employed to analyze the effect of ES on the activation of MNN.
A total of 102 healthy adults were recruited and 72 participants' data were analysed in the final report. The block averaged Hb data showed that HbO concentration increased and HbR concentration decreased in most MNN regions during ME and MI in both groups. The LMM results showed that ES can significantly improve the activation of inferior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and precentral gyrus during MI, the supplementary motor area, inferior parietal lobule, and superior temporal gyri showed increased activation, but without statistical significance. Although the results did not reach statistical significance during ME, ES still showed positive effects on increased overall activations.
In this study, we present potential novel rehabilitation approaches that combines MNN strategies and low-frequency ES to enhance cortical activation. Our results revealed that ES has potential to increase activation of most MNN brain areas, providing evidence for related rehabilitative interventions and device development.
This study was registered on the China Clinical Trial Registration Center (identifier: ChiCTR2200064082, registered 26, September 2022, https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=178285).
基于镜像神经元网络（MNN）对目标动作进行观察、执行和模仿已成为常见的物理治疗策略。电刺激（ES）是康复治疗中提高肌肉力量和运动控制的常用干预措施。将运动执行（ME）和运动模仿（MI）与ES同时结合使用，有可能增强MNN的激活。本研究旨在揭示ES是否会影响ME和MI过程中的皮质激活。
我们招募了健康个体，并将他们随机分配到对照组（CG）或实验组（EG）。EG组的参与者在接受ES的同时执行ME和MI任务，而CG组的参与者在接受假ES的情况下执行相同的两项任务。我们利用功能近红外光谱（fNIRS）来检测在有和没有ES的情况下，ME和MI过程中MNN的脑激活情况，设计了随机区组设计实验范式。对氧合血红蛋白（HbO）和脱氧血红蛋白（HbR）进行描述性分析，以显示CG组和EG组在不同事件发作后血红蛋白（Hb）浓度的变化，采用HbO数据的线性混合效应模型（LMM）来分析ES对MNN激活的影响。
共招募了102名健康成年人，最终报告中分析了72名参与者的数据。区组平均Hb数据显示，在ME和MI过程中，两组大多数MNN区域的HbO浓度升高，HbR浓度降低。LMM结果显示，ES能显著改善MI过程中下额回、额中回和中央前回的激活，辅助运动区、顶下小叶和颞上回的激活增加，但无统计学意义。虽然在ME过程中结果未达到统计学意义，但ES对整体激活增加仍显示出积极作用。
在本研究中，我们提出了将MNN策略与低频ES相结合以增强皮质激活的潜在新型康复方法。我们的结果表明，ES有潜力增加大多数MNN脑区的激活，为相关康复干预和设备开发提供了证据。
本研究在中国临床试验注册中心注册（标识符：ChiCTR2200064082，于2022年9月26日注册，https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=178285）。
